Yet another thing we have entire books and movie series about what will go wrong, and probably how. Yet somehow a way will be found to make it go wrong in exactly those ways.

Naturally the price for the cheapest model will also be going to up several orders of magnitude more than the cost of materials, labor, and healthy profit margin to account for that as well I’m sure.

Someone found something that still depends on the control panel that will not be easily moved or done away with I bet.

Musk is learning the lesson Google and Youtube learned years ago with the “adpocalypse”. If the whole house of cards depends on ad dollars you have to keep them happy.

Unless Musk is going to take X (Twitter) completely subscription only, or fund it exclusively out of his own pocket, he is not going to get that “anything I want goes” utopia he keeps crowing about.

That stance will change if they ever get acquired. Might even get the chance to see James Cuda try and walk back this stance in a few years.

Cheap hookers that won’t give me weird things on my junk are rigged.

This kind of thing getting worse and worse at all levels of tech is increasingly pushing me to the fringes of tech solutions (with all of the handicaps that come with that) as those are getting to be the only places where this kind of thing is not pervasive.

• No apps on phone, if the mobile site doesn’t work it can wait until I am in front of a desktop/laptop
• No NFC payments as that requires the phone to be blessed by lord Google or father Apple
• No set top streaming boxes on the TV, just a small Linux powered PC and a cheap Logitech wireless keyboard/trackpad
• Only Linux OSes on desktop/laptop

My complaint is not that the “appliance” solutions exist for those that want them. But that there is next to no room in the market now for options that are not those “appliance” solutions for those that do want them but also want to take part in the modern tech world with things like NFC payments without having to trick the services with Magisk modules.

The world of mobile phones is a real world example of what we avoided on the PC back in the day when the IBM BIOS got reverse engineered, allowing for someone to put out an IBM compatible PC without having to pay the tithe to big blue first. Not that IBM didn’t do their level best to put those efforts in the ground with their lawyers and the courts as soon as they found out about it. Thankfully the legal system of the time didn’t allow that to happen.

It has been pretty depressing to me that the tech literate have been so easily lulled into accepting such things in the name of “cool toys” and “security” virtually everywhere in modern life besides the PC/laptop/server spaces.

Phones, TV set top boxes, smart TVs, IoT gear. They are all a cesspit of locked down propitiatory and gate kept gardens where nothing happens without the gardens keeper getting a cut and having final say over everything.

This sort of control and gatekeeping from the likes of Google, Apple, and Qualcomm was not something that was hard to see coming a mile away, yet we all collectively let it happen anyway.

I worked somewhere like that back in the 2008-2010 time frame. Thankfully, there was a extension, I believe the name was “IETab”, that would spawn a new tab in Trident (IE’s browser engine). So you could set certain sites to launch in one of those tabs and everything else would use standard Firefox. None of the people I supported were any the wiser. They just thought everything worked in Firefox.

Granted it was only that seamless because Windows already had that rendering engine built in. There are some extensions that do something similar with Chrome, but because of more modern security standards and whatnot you have to install extension helper applications which is gross.

This kind of shit is why Googles (and anyone else that tries it as well) ever increasing push to put a layer of ads into anything is so off putting to me. Sure ads are annoying, but they are also probably second only to social engineering as the method for someones device and accounts getting compromised.

I personally will not go back to the days where just the act of visiting a website and clicking on nothing has a good chance of loading some Javascript and infecting my browser or whole device with the drive by malware of the day because the shit heads that run the site are to lazy to vet what they are letting their site call out too and the third party ad networks are to lazy to vet what sorts of things they are allowing their ad networks to serve.

Gotta get that post nut clarity to make sure it is you and not the horny feelings leading you to making that decision.

I dream of working somewhere where this kind of effort is appreciated enough to motivate me to put in the effort of actually doing it.

They are just butt hurt that this whole thing really shines a light on how inaccurate the line of “the world runs on Linux” truly is.

The world runs on a lot of different things for different reasons and that does not fit nicely into their Richard Stallman like world view.

This is not gonna stop until the consumer puts their money where there mouths are and stops using Windows until Microsoft back peddles. Money is all a company understands so that is where you need to hit them if you want them to listen. But as a group the consumer has a very weak constitution when it comes to having to do something that is good for them in the long term but causes them short term inconvenience. A lot of parallels to the modern corporate world in that.

Tesla will probably be a case study one day in how to get the lead in a market that is hard to break into and somehow squander it.

In my experience you either have to trade one devil for the other with Apple or accept buying hardware from the ad company so you can use GrapheneOS.

Sure, I could. But I wanted to leave the original post as it was for transparency. I figured that was the most “open” thing to do.

It has always been kind of funny to me that the painters of these official portraits had to at some point get directions along the lines of “I want it to be flattering but clearly me” for some of the portraits they had to do of what had to be pretty bridge troll ugly looking people.

Talk about going home that night after getting the assignment, having a stiff drink, and wondering how the hell you are going to get out of this one.